Five myths about creativity in a pandemi
Is social distancing and widespread lockdown the right time for you to do creative work?
Here are six reasons (equally truths and refutable myths) about this time of trouble as a bad time to get creative work done—and as an inescapably rich period of creativity:
1. Carrying on with a creative job.
Truth-Myth
You don’t have a choice about doing creative work - the work you do requires creative effort and the work must go on, but the creative well is empty, or it’s swamped with the news, the feelings, the changes that consume you. Yet you are designing, leading, writing, coaching, teaching, or otherwise strapping on the creativity harness no matter what, possibly because it feels like there’s no choice. It feels hard, and like a bad time to try to be creative.
Creative shift
This is a massively creative time, despite the unwelcome causes. Whatever our regular work, changed work, or lack of work, we are all adapting, re-thinking, innovating, re-engineering solutions, sometimes creating like mad just to get through the day.
We’re in a dark wood of the unknown, even apart from the fundamental unknowns about the pandemic and its many effects on society. The dark wood of the unknown is where all genuinely creative work has to pass through. Many aspects of work, home, and community life are evolving if not being reinvented on the fly.
Your experience and facility with creative work is something you can fall back on for confidence and resourcefulness that are then a gift to others who are less likely to recognize their own creative identities and abilities. You can show us that creativity is more than watercolors or screenplays, valued as those are. Your facility for creativity provides a model for creative challenge everywhere.
2. So much time
Truth-Myth
Out of the blue, you have the kind of time and space you’ve longed for to do some creative work that normal life didn’t have room for—if you could only get started. Though it seems like it should be, it’s not a good time to start something creative. You’re not Shakespeare. You’re not Isaac Newton. You’re just trying to get through a very hard time. Your creativity will return when things are more normal.
Creative shift
These are distracting times, to say the least. There are many obstacles to getting started, or getting finished, with creative work even in normal times.
Set yourself one small step to take today or tomorrow. That may be to write the briefest of statements about what you want to explore, create, or achieve. Then set yourself a small step to take after that, today or tomorrow. If you want help with that, check out the Creativity Compass.
3. Essential functions
Truth-Myth
With an essential job, you have to keep going to work as usual, or more than usual, at a designated essential job, or at valuable, not-so-creative work you were already doing from home. Now you find yourself re-engineering that work and your ability to do it in these strange times. You have less space for the get-around-to-it creative work than ever. How could anyone even expect you to be creative during a pandemic?
Creative shift
The problems you must solve to do your work in new conditions, or to show up as the kind of professional or the kind of human you mean to be in possibly overwhelming circumstances, are likely creative problems.
We are in uncharted territory—the crux-condition and definition of creative work. Some or many things about the way you’ve worked before won’t work now. You’re reinventing, adapting, evolving, and innovating.
Finding ways to take care of yourself well enough to stay strong enough may be the most creative challenge of all. Necessity is the mother of most kinds of inventions. It’s never been truer or more critical.
This may not be the creative work you imagined doing. Instead, it’s the creative work your fellow humans are grateful you’re there doing now.
4. What extra time??
Truth-Myth
At home with people underfoot and not enough space or peace to think, and/or with a job that is suddenly taking more time and mental space than ever, you could be frustrated that you’ve traded one too-busy-for-creativity situation for another. Adding a creative project could be the last straw.
Creative shift
Your first creative project may be creating enough time and space for the creative work you long for in the circumstances you find yourself—if you long for it enough to work it into what you’re already doing, and if, with some adjustments, it’s a possibility in your life now.
How will you succeed anyway? Your answers, short term and long term, for creating a place for creative work will be your own, but you are not alone in your challenges.
You are likely doing creative work just running your day to day life in different, shifting circumstances and possibly more unknowns than you’ve ever had to work with. Credit yourself with wins for that all day long.
If making space for your preferred creative work anyway is still a possibility and your intent, I refer you up to number 2 above, So much time. Yes, I feel the irony. And the same steps can help.
Find one right-sized step, with blinders on for the moment for rest of the scope of your project. When you have one win under your belt, you have room for one more right-sized step. There you are, doing your creative work anyway.
Try the Creativity Compass. Do what you can. Make your expectations right-sized, and re-sized, as often as need be.
5. Stuck in a not-so-sweet spot.
Truth-Myth
Circumstances feel right for creative work at last—you have the time and space you’ve said you craved to start or finish a creative project—but your emotional and attentional state is strained to the point that you do well to get through some kind of a day, much less dive into a creative project. Maybe you got that stop-the-world-time you always asked for and never imagined might come this way, but now that it’s here, it’s just wrong to expect that you could be creative with everything you’re facing.
Creative shift
Creating in crisis is a challenge and an opportunity. For now, the opportunity is to tell yourself the most truth you can about being creative now.
Start with acknowledging the necessarily creative work you’re probably already doing, even if it’s largely internal to adapt your thinking and expectations, manage your mindset, and find ways to meet your most important needs. That may be all the creative work you can do or need to do for now. If that’s the truth, own it.
The hard truth you tell yourself may be different. It may be about asking for help, taking smaller or larger steps, getting real about what you really want or what’s possible, about challenging yourself to GO BIG, or supporting yourself to be in a state of exploration or not knowing for a while longer.
Your hard truth may be about finding a way to make a creative project work without excuses, or about acknowledging limitations and adapting expectations. Or it’s something else entirely.
There’s no recipe or set of commandments for creativity. There is a map of the territory, though, and a world of creative people who do or know about creative work and can help you find your way whether by example, instruction, or interaction.
Go to the Creativity Compass and make your map. See if that helps you find out what’s true for your creative life right now.
Go out into the (currently virtual) world of creatives of all kinds (artists, scientists, leaders, parents, teachers, technologists, helpers, servers, most of us really). Explore. Put your attention on what sparks your creativity, lifts you up, gives you hope or direction. Start there.
Where you woke up today
Wherever you find yourself on the spectrum of creating in crisis, just know that. Know where you are. From that place, you can notice the creativity happening all around us, around the globe. We have unprecedented access to witness it, and to join in where we are. You are creative now. It’s what you woke up to again today.